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Brian Doherty on Getting the U.S. Out of Afghanistan

2012-02-08T16:30:00-05:00

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced last week an unexpectedly early deadline of summer 2013 for winding down the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.

Well, kind of, supposedly, or perhaps with the same amount of seriousness that the administration took the July 2011 drawdown deadline that never was. The same New York Times story reporting on Panetta’s announcement also notes that “Mr. Panetta said no decisions had been made about the number of American troops to be withdrawn in 2013, and he made clear that substantial fighting lies ahead.” In other words, there are plenty of American soldiers and Afghans alike who will be dying for a mistake. Senior Editor Brian Doherty argues that it's time for all U.S. forces in Afghanistan to come home.

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It's Never Too Early to Finally Leave Afghanistan

2012-02-08T16:30:00-05:00

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced last week an unexpectedly early deadline of summer 2013 for winding down the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.

Well, kind of, supposedly, or perhaps with the same amount of seriousness that the administration took the July 2011 drawdown deadline that never was. The same New York Times story reporting on Panetta’s announcement also notes that “Mr. Panetta said no decisions had been made about the number of American troops to be withdrawn in 2013, and he made clear that substantial fighting lies ahead.” (In other words, there are plenty of American soldiers and Afghans alike who will still be dying for a mistake.)

Part of what Panetta means is that Special Operations—still U.S. military, still involved in fighting—will be taking on more of the burden of our impossible mission and possibly even increasing in number, while conventional forces start leaving in larger numbers.

This is likely to be just one more example of a decade's worth of pronouncements from American officials about progress or improvement in Afghanistan that shouldn’t be taken very seriously. As Foreign Policy reported last week following Panetta’s much hyped statement:

In Chicago, meanwhile, the President's Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes insisted there will be no change to the 2014 plan [agreed to in a Lisbon meeting in 2010 by NATO], warning that "We will need allies to remain committed to that goal." The president's Special Assistant for European Affairs Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, evidently ignorant of Panetta's statement, assured reporters that the Secretary of Defense "will be very clear about our plans to remain on the Lisbon timeline.”

About 90,000 U.S. troops are there now, with up to 22,000 supposedly already set to leave before the end of 2012. As The New York Times reports, there has “been no decision on the number of troops to be committed to the mission as it evolves in 2013 and into 2014.”

Another possible barrier between Panetta’s intentions and reality in 2013/2014 is the election between now and then. While Mitt Romney, the most likely Republican contender, has approved of the end-of-2014 withdrawal, he also seems to think that Panetta’s announced plan to have the Afghans assume more responsibility for their own security starting before then is unconscionable. Romney announces that he intends, somehow, to end the war “by beating” the Taliban. As a decade and more of U.S. forces and commanders might say, good luck with that.

France has also declared that it is bugging out with its 3,900 troops (most of them hunkered down in defensive positions nowadays—U.S. forces have long complained about the political restrictions our European allies place on their small numbers of troops) ahead of its NATO compatriots by end of 2013. That announcement came at a joint appearance of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, where Karzai seemed to agree with Sarkozy that getting foreign combat troops out by that deadline would be a good thing. But then again Karzai has never been a satisfactory satrap, even beyond the questionable “democracy” behind his elected leadership in a land to which we are allegedly trying to bring real democracy.

In his interesting new book The Operators—spun off the Rolling Stone feature that cost Gen. Stanley McChrystal his job leading our Afghan forces by revealing his and his staff’s contempt for their civilian chain of command—reporter Michael Hastings notes that our own diplomats often understand that “U.S. forces are not fighting and dying to combat terrorists, but are fighting and dying in local political disputes.”

Our forces on the ground rarely understood the specifics of the complicated tribal chaos they were involved in, and in specific cases, as Hastings concluded, having our troops leave any specific valley “is as meaningless as staying in those valleys—no impact on our national security or the stability in Afghanistan whatsoever.”

Despite all our efforts, our military and security situation in Afghanistan has been getting worse—2011 saw the highest number of civilian deaths in the war since it began, at 3,000. And they’ve been getting steadily worse, with each of the past five years having a higher number of deaths than the year before. In 2011, 410 of those deaths were directly caused by U.S. and allied forces, even beyond the question of how many of those deaths were caused by the fact that we are there providing a reason and target for Taliban insurgents to attack. See this marvelously deadpan detail from The New York Times: “French ground troops remain only in Kapisa Province, a relatively quiet area with little insurgent sympathy or activity, other than a few suicide bomb attacks on the French.”

As I noted in 2010, too many American big thinkers and military strategists feel aggrieved by the Afghans' "failure" to rise to the occasion that our invasion and occupation are supposed to have provided for them. It’s true our allies and enemies are equally menaces to our troops—Afghan soldiers are occasionally killing or attacking our own, and those of the French and our other allies, in more than three dozen incidents in the past five years. Not that our troops haven’t been also wantonly killing civilians as well, and urinating on dead soldiers’ corpses to boot. Let’s say there are curious tensions on all sides of this contentious relationship between occupiers and occupied. The Afghan army we will want to take up our mantle as we leave is largely written off, even by U.S. analysts, as a bunch of illiterate, craven, deserting, drug addicts who are likely to just be the enemy in disguise anyway. Since the “enemy” is also just another huge gang of armed Afghans, this isn’t too surprising.

Lt. Col Daniel Davis wrote at length about his own on-the-ground experiences in Afghanistan for Armed Forces Journal. He wrote:

What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground…. In all of the places I visited, the tactical situation was bad to abysmal. If the events I have described [numerous anecdotes of security failures and fecklessness and out-of-control violence]— and many, many more I could mention — had been in the first year of war, or even the third or fourth, one might be willing to believe that Afghanistan was just a hard fight, and we should stick it out. Yet these incidents all happened in the 10th year of war.

As the numbers depicting casualties and enemy violence indicate the absence of progress, so too did my observations of the tactical situation all over Afghanistan.

When having to decide whether to continue a war, alter its aims or to close off a campaign that cannot be won at an acceptable price, our senior leaders have an obligation to tell Congress and American people the unvarnished truth and let the people decide what course of action to choose. That is the very essence of civilian control of the military. The American people deserve better than what they’ve gotten from their senior uniformed leaders over the last number of years.

The Afghans don’t love us for what we’ve done for them, and our soldiers and diplomats all know it. Because we haven’t done much that they should love us for. In a country that’s known little but war for most of its people's lifetimes, with a GDP grossly dependent on both international aid (that aid alone is almost equal to Afghanistan’s entire GDP, which has a measured per capita income of just $528 a year) and illegal drugs, we haven’t been godsends.

Rather, we make weak attempts to eradicate their best-selling crops and our international aid, as a World Bank report from November 2011 summed up, “in a situation of weak governance have been major sources of rents, patronage, and political power” helping prop up a government seen almost universally as useless and corrupt, and when tribal enmities arise, as an outright enemy.

Villagers commonly fear the very local police we fund and arm, creating comically horrific scenes where Afghan special forces and police get in public and murderous gun battles over whether someone was having sex with someone’s young male cousin. Our much-despised “night raids” on people’s homes aren’t building trust. We were spending absurd amounts building roads to, as Hastings concludes, “mak[e] it easier for us to drive around the country to kill the disgruntled peasants.” Afghanistan is less modern, rich, irrigated, and civilized than it was 40 years ago. Almost anyone with any ambition or intelligence wants nothing more than to leave.

And now maybe we want to as well. We certainly should.

Sure, Obama said that Afghanistan was “a war of necessity” that we “had to win.” But it wasn’t true; and he got suckered into giving the military a surge of new troops that tripled our footprint and quadrupled our expense to allegedly carry out counterinsurgency strategy in a way that would actually pacify and revive the country. Obama’s first general that was truly his, McChrystal, liked to talk about how the unfathomable complexity of the Afghanistan situation made it difficult to be quite sure whether we were definitely making progress or not.

But mostly it should have been easy to see that we were not making progress—his own lower level commanders and troops often objecting strenuously to upper-level insistence on counterinsurgency strategy based, in theory, on not killing enemies but protecting civilians (though both enemies and civilians continue to be killed), a technique that actual American soldiers are ill-trained to carry out.

The chaos we are likely to leave behind will be somewhat our fault, yes. But it would be idiotic to make an entire nation’s social and political order our responsibility forever, even if the very fact that we have announced with some believability an intention to leave means that our leverage over their government and their insurgents will start falling. We can’t let the fact that past government actions have created unmanageable problems be an excuse to expend life and treasure forever trying to manage those problems, a lesson we need to learn with both domestic (hello, health care) and foreign policy.

Panetta admits that the cost to the U.S. and its NATO allies of propping up the Afghan army might be getting prohibitive, and that, “The funding is going to largely determine the kind of force we can sustain in the future,” though I don’t believe he’ll end up meaning it. After all, when was the last time cost considerations dictated foreign policy or military spending? The troop costs, despite our vaunted international coalition, are mostly ours. We are the only nation with over 10,000 troops there.

The political costs for bad foreign policy are also too low. Most Americans don’t genuinely care. Even an “end to the war in Afghanistan” will likely mean we can concentrate more on the expansion of the war into Pakistan, across whose border our Afghan enemies often run and hide. This will mean the concomitant expansion of largely ignored war crimes, like drone attacks on those who arrive on the scene of previous drone attacks, or on funerals mourning the victims of previous drone attacks.

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told West Point cadets last year that “Any future secretary of defense who advises the president to again send a big American land army into the Middle East or Africa should have their head examined.” That wisdom applies as well to wars that we (and he) foolishly got us stuck in for too long in the first place. Being doggedly committed to a policy with no clear end that consists of shipping tens of thousands of men and billions of dollars of weapons across the globe so young men can march around and maybe get shot at or step on an IED, or maybe if they are lucky get to shoot at and kill some native who is, in his own mind, fighting for his own tribe or gang or country’s defense from foreign invaders, was and is similarly mad. Everyone seems to know that the situation in Afghanistan is and will remain a mess, though some seem to pretend that more of the same intervention and occupation that led to this mess will somehow—through unspecified means—fix things. But there is no reason to believe that’s so and no reason to keep trying.

Whether Panetta’s drawdown schedule is true or not, it does not seem that the United States has learned any important lessons from the experience. After a long propaganda campaign, 54 percent of Americans seem ready to accept a new war in Iran, and Syria may be on our agenda as well.

With wars being fought overseas against people unable to actually harm our homeland, all paid for by borrowing money and with no military draft in force, it’s easy enough for the American people to just sigh and forget about it. Consider the fact that media coverage of Afghanistan has dropped by half over the past year, and realize why it's easy for the D.C. establishment to get away with whatever it wants in such foreign adventures.

Any legitimate argument for us being there—shattering the government that sheltered the 9/11 attackers and disrupting those attackers' network—have been over for a very long time. It's galling to realize we may leave a situation little better than the one we could have left a long time ago. But it’s true—and sad and depressing is the price you pay for a horrible mistake. What we are up to there now has nothing to do with al Qaeda or preventing terror against our homeland, and it has very little to do with building a democratic and sane Afghanistan. The lesson we need to learn for the future is not how to manage these insurgent-fighting or nation-building affairs more intelligently, or brutally, or quickly; it’s to not get involved in them at all.

Senior Editor Brian Doherty is author of Radicals for Capitalism (PublicAffairs) and the forthcoming Ron Paul’s Revolution (Broadside).

Iranian Parliament Summons President as Economy Sputters

2012-02-08T16:23:00-05:00

Iranians have been feeling the crunch of foreign sanctions on the country's economy. Prices for gold and American dollars are way up. Reuters reports food shortages and word of mouth carries stories of the frantic stockpiling of meat, rice, and other staples. According to one Iranian service employee, "We know they want to pressure us so we rise against our government, but we are not in a position to do that." The New York Times reports:

Ordinary Iranians complain that the sanctions are hurting them, while those at the top are unscathed, or even benefit. Many wealthy Iranians made huge profits in recent weeks by buying dollars at the government rate (available to insiders) and then selling them for almost twice as many rials on the soaring black market. Some analysts and opposition political figures contend that Mr. Ahmadinejad deliberately worsened the currency crisis so that his cronies could generate profits this way.

The Iranian parliament appears to have caught wind of some of these grievances. On Tuesday the deputy speaker announced a successful vote to summon President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Al Jazeera reports that he will face "questioning over a long list of accusations including mismanagement of the nation's economy." Though Parliament has the constitutional power to call the president in for questioning, no president has been summoned since the inception of the current regime in 1979.

Meanwhile, other branches of the Iranian government have been demonstrating increasing anxiety in the run-up to the March 2 parliamentary elections. As I've previously noted, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has stepped up arbitrary arrests of journalists, activists, and foreign nationals. The judiciary has been upholding their death sentences. Khamenei has warned against protests surrounding the March elections more than once, urging voters and losing candidates not to repeat the uprisings of 2009:

The last issue relating to the elections: The authorities should not ignore the conspiracies of the enemies against the elections. Those who do not receive enough votes in the elections should also be aware and should not be fooled like those who did not get any votes in 2009. They should not be deceived... Don't blame the elections, don't help the enemy, and an atmosphere of conflict and hopelessness should not be displayed in the campaign so we can, God willing, have a good election. [Emphasis added]

It is unclear to which enemy Khamenei is referring, but given the context, it's likely he is referring to civil unrest and not his other main preocuppation, Western influence. Ahmadinejad's allies have been campaigning in the boonies to secure some kind of success for themselves in the election. This gesture of summoning Ahmadinejad for questioning may be the existing Parliament's attempt to influence the outcome of the elections.

Ron Paul's Campaign Defends Its Successes

2012-02-08T15:45:00-05:00

A press release from the Ron Paul campaign on the heels of the three nonbinding votes of yesterday (in which Paul came in a strong second in Minnesota, above supposed frontrunner Romney but still far behind the mysterious rise of Rick Santorum) makes the case for a Paul campaign that has been more successful than the media or public might recognize:

[Paul's campaign manager John Tate says]:

“As people across the country view the results of yesterday’s contests, it is important to consider a few facts that have not been clearly reported. Not one single delegate was awarded yesterday, instead the caucuses in Minnesota and Colorado were the very first step in the delegate selection process. And there are still over 40 states left to go. The Ron Paul campaign plans to continue to vie for delegates nationwide....

1) The Missouri primary means nothing. It was a non-binding beauty contest, and the contest that matters in the ‘show me’ state won’t take place for another month. The Ron Paul campaign is well positioned to win delegates in Missouri’s caucus a month from now.

2) As in Iowa where not 1 of the 28 delegates has been awarded yet, in Colorado and Nevada the Paul campaign will do very well in the state delegate counts. We will have good numbers among the actual delegates awarded, far exceeding our straw poll numbers.

3) In Minnesota where we have finished a solid second, we also have a strong majority of the state convention delegates, and the process to elect delegates has also just begun, the Paul campaign is well-organized to win the bulk of delegates there.

“We are confident in gaining a much larger share of delegates than even our impressive showing yesterday indicates. As an example of our campaign’s delegate strength, take a look at what has occurred in Colorado:

In one precinct in Larimer County, the straw poll vote was 23 for Santorum, 13 for Paul, 5 for Romney, 2 for Gingrich. There were 13 delegate slots, and Ron Paul got ALL 13.

In a precinct in Delta County the vote was 22 for Santorum, 12 for Romney, 8 for Paul, 7 for Gingrich. There were 5 delegate slots, and ALL 5 went to Ron Paul.

In a Pueblo County precinct, the vote was 16 for Santorum, 11 for Romney, 3 for Gingrich and 2 for Paul. There were 2 delegate slots filled, and both were filled by Ron Paul supporters.

We are also seeing the same trends in Minnesota, Nevada, and Iowa, and in Missouri as well.

“We may well win Minnesota, and do far better in Colorado than yesterday’s polls indicate.

“In the latest national poll from Reuters/Ipsos Poll, Ron Paul places a strong second with 21 percent, gaining ground on his main competitor nationally, Mitt Romney, whose support seems to be fading at 29 percent. Congressman Paul’s support has grown by 5 percentage points nationally since January, while Romney has seen a 30 percent decline in his support since January.

“This poll follows a January 30th Gallup Poll showing Dr. Paul within the margin of error of defeating Obama. Also, a January 16th CNN/ORC Poll showed Congressman Paul and Obama in a virtual tie in a general election showdown.

Politico on Paul's Minnesota efforts that led him to second place there. My forthcoming book, Ron Paul's Revolution.

Reason Writers on TV: Peter Suderman Talks Federal Education Spending with David Asman on Power & Money

2012-02-08T15:42:00-05:00

President Obama wants to spend more federal tax dollars on public education. But will more spending produce better results? On Tuesday, February 7, Reason associate editor Peter Suderman appeared on Fox Business' Power and Money argues that decades of increases in federal education spending has yet to increase overall educational attainment—and there's no reason to think that this will be any different. Approximately four minutes.

Peter Suderman on Mitt Romney, Consultant in Chief

2012-02-08T15:00:00-05:00

In 2010, the GOP successfully unified around an anti-spending message that helped it retake the House. Yet now, writes Associate Editor Peter Suderman, as Republicans frame the 2012 elections as a referendum on the size and scope of government, the party allegedly in favor of reducing both is on the verge of nominating for president not a small-government firebrand or a free market apostle but former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a management consultant more interested in tweaking hated policies than doing away with them.

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Consultant in Chief

2012-02-08T15:00:00-05:00

For the last three years, the Republican Party has been driven by what it’s against. Since taking office, President Barack Obama has created a target-rich environment for the GOP: an $800 billion stimulus that failed to deliver on promises to reduce unemployment, a $1 trillion health care overhaul that remains deeply unpopular, three years of record spending, and a $5 trillion increase in the national debt.

In 2010, the party successfully unified around an anti-spending message that helped it retake the House. And the base has rallied around the cause: When Fox News asked Republican primary voters about their priorities in October, 76 percent responded that economic issues “such as taxes and government spending” would be most important in deciding their votes for the party’s presidential nominee. Yet even as Republicans frame the 2012 elections as a referendum on the size and scope of government, the party allegedly in favor of reducing both is on the verge of nominating for president not a small-government firebrand or a free market apostle but a management consultant more interested in tweaking hated policies than doing away with them.

He’s not just any consultant, of course. Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who ran unsuccessfully for the GOP’s last presidential nomination, earned an estimated $250 million fortune in the management advice business—first as a consultant, then as CEO of a private equity firm spun off from his consultancy. Romney turned around a series of companies, helped introduce major innovations to the art of business management, saved a Winter Olympics from the brink of scandal and bankruptcy, and even righted the ship when one of the most prominent management consulting companies in the world was foundering. Then he applied the lessons he learned along the way to his gig as the Bay State’s governor, with mixed results. And now Romney is bringing his life-long business-strategy ethic to the uphill task of running for president.

After squeaking out a victory in the January 3 Iowa caucus, Romney was well positioned to win the GOP nomination. But the consultant’s road to the White House is paved with built-in contradictions, which Romney has a tendency to display all at once. At a speech in Washington last October, for example, the candidate made his pitch to conservative activists, unveiling a framework plan to cut spending and reform Medicare. Warning that it would require “tough choices,” he talked up the need to identify $500 billion in annual federal budget savings. There are “a lot” of federal programs that should “either be dramatically scaled back or cut,” he said. “We’re going to eliminate or cut programs that are not absolutely essential—even when we like them.”

What tough choices was Romney willing to make? Which popular programs would he eliminate? Just at the part of the speech where you’d expect some details, he shifted focus, promising to “preserve our commitment to a military that is so strong that no nation would ever think of testing it.” In fact, Romney swore he would “reverse Obama’s massive defense cuts.” And the alleged budget-cutter wasn’t done criticizing the president for his spending reductions. Later in the same speech, he even scolded Obama for weakening Medicare, vowing to “protect” and “improve” this most budget-busting of entitlements. Obama is “the only president in history,” Romney said, almost in wonder, “who has cut Medicare for seniors.” Rest assured that a Romney administration would reverse those cuts, too.

On paper, Romney was supposedly offering the gathered conservatives a vision of a “simpler, smaller, and smarter” federal government. But most of what little he offered in the way of specified cuts were drops in the ocean of a $3.6 trillion budget: defunding Amtrak ($1.6 billion a year) and Planned Parenthood ($300 million), eliminating foreign aid (which cost $49 billion in 2011) to “countries that oppose American interests,” reducing the budgets of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (less than $1 billion a year combined).

The gap between Romney’s cautious proposals and the GOP grassroots’ anti-spending fervor might seem like a paradox, but it’s easy to see how it came about. The last time Republicans held power in Washington, they jacked up discretionary non-defense spending by more than 60 percent, passed a new prescription drug entitlement, created a major new security bureaucracy that now costs $50 billion a year, and helped pass a $150 billion economic stimulus plan. The party’s most recent nominee for president was so enthusiastic about the Troubled Asset Relief Program that he suspended his campaign to help it pass.

In running an election roadshow that rails against bad policy while proposing only to tinker with it, Romney is holding up a mirror to the weaknesses and internal contradictions of the client he’s pitching. He is doing what top management consultants always do: presenting the customer with a slicker, better packaged, but fundamentally unchanged version of itself.

A Consultant’s Consultant

The old joke about management consultants is that they charge you to drink your coffee and then tell you what it tastes like. But the most successful consultants—and by any definition, that includes Mitt Romney—tend to do more than simply sip and summarize.

At its core, the business is based on problem solving. Management consultants ask the same basic question over and over again, explains Avik Roy, a former health policy analyst at the Romney-founded firm Bain Capital and current senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute: “If you’ve got a problem, how do you then break the problem down into discrete parts that we can then empirically address?” The job requires narrowing down mountains of data into a few key metrics, then feeding the information back to the client in executive-friendly formats such as PowerPoint slide shows, colorful pie charts, PDFs splattered with bullet points, historical line graphs, and so on.

Clients come into the process with a problem-solving challenge of their own: figuring out what they really want. Often, Roy says, that turns out to be “political legitimacy and blame dispersion for unpopular decisions.” Solving that problem requires a certain diplomatic sensitivity as well as a judgment-free willingness to roll with the punches. “This is a client-oriented business, so you need to be client-oriented,” Roy explains, which means ensuring that the final product isn’t too upsetting. “You want them to be satisfied with the output.”

Consulting work has defined Romney’s private-sector career. From the time he left school until the time he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1994, Mitt Romney never had a job that didn’t involve some flavor of management consulting. After graduating in the top 5 percent of his class at Harvard Business School in 1975, he headed straight into the upper echelons of the burgeoning consulting industry. He spent a few years at the Boston Consulting Group, then joined Bain & Company, another top-tier consultancy. He founded the company’s private equity offshoot, Bain Capital, in 1984. But he didn’t leave management consulting behind.

According to Stephen Kaplan, a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, private equity investors in the early 1980s focused primarily on financial engineering, “where they would borrow the money, they would give management a lot of equity, and then they would monitor it. But they didn’t really help on the business side.” That changed with Bain Capital. Romney’s “big innovation,” Kaplan says, was “to bring consulting resources along with the financial engineering.”

That innovation helped make Romney a rich man. Today Romney’s estimated worth is somewhere between $190 million and $250 million, much of it acquired during his tenure as Bain Capital’s top executive. Romney so excelled at the job that he eventually became a consultant’s consultant. When his former colleagues at Bain & Company ran into financial trouble in 1990, Romney was called back in, named CEO, and asked to turn the business around. With the help of new management and financial restructuring, he did.

What did Romney get out of the turnaround? Not a hefty salary. At that point, he was so wealthy that he hardly needed it, reportedly taking a symbolic paycheck of $1 a year. A few years later, when he was brought in to save the Salt Lake City Olympics Committee after the organization’s management ran into trouble, he donated his entire $1.4 million salary to charity.

Romney wasn’t in it for the money; he was in it for the love of the game. “He’s doing what comes naturally,” says Scott Meadow, a friend and former venture capitalist who worked with Romney on multiple business deals during the last 25 years. “He enjoys the creativity that goes with problem solving, and he’s good at it.” For Romney, the turnarounds at Bain & Company and the Olympics were just fresh problems that needed to be solved.

Governor Romney

In 1994 Romney ran for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts as a Republican against the liberal icon and longtime incumbent Ted Kennedy. He lost by 17 percentage points, but he didn’t give up his political ambitions. As he had helped so many businesses do, he took stock and adjusted his strategy. In 2002 he ran for governor, touting his business experience and promising to resolve a budget crisis without raising taxes. He also looked left, reaching out to the state’s liberal voters and assuring a local TV reporter that he was a “moderate…not a partisan.” “My views are progressive,” he said. This time he won. Romney, who reportedly invested $6 million of his own money in the campaign, again declined to take a salary.

When Romney took office, the most pressing difficulty was that Massachusetts was in the midst of what The Boston Globe described in 2008 as a “fiscal meltdown.” The state was short $650 million for the current year’s budget, and budget planners quickly realized that the following year would be even worse. Without a course correction, the deficit was projected to run as high as $3 billion—in a state with a $23 billion total budget.

Romney and his team repaired the budget using a process similar to the one he used in his days as a management consultant: gather data, identify key metrics, define the problem, apply a solution. But this left him with little choice but to go soft on his campaign promise of no tax hikes.

Romney staffers broke the budget down into its component parts, then settled on what they understood to be the main problem: insufficient tax revenue. In particular, they told the governor, the state was losing money because Massachusetts banks were avoiding taxes by moving money into minimally taxed real estate trusts. So Romney charged his revenue commissioner with collecting from the banks. He also imposed what the Club for Growth, a low-tax advocacy group, would later describe as “a slew of fee hikes and tax loophole closures,” totaling $259 million in 2006. Although he would also convince the state legislature to allow $343 million in cuts to both city and state functions, Gov. Romney throughout his tenure continued to impose hundreds of millions in new fees while eliminating targeted tax breaks. And as the budget picture brightened, his appetite for spending restraint weakened: According to the Club for Growth, the state’s proposed 2007 budget was 11.2 percent larger than the previous year’s.

But Romney also made sure to remain client focused. And his new clients, which included both the liberal-leaning population of Massachusetts and the state’s Democratic legislature, wanted universal health insurance. The state already boasted the highest insurance coverage rate in the United States (around 94 percent), but the public wanted even more: According to a 2008 report in the journal Health Affairs, polls showed majorities in favor of expanding coverage. The Bay State’s “favorable political environment,” the article concluded, “encouraged leaders to act.”

This time, when Romney acted, his process was explicitly consultant driven. He hired a team of health care consultants at McKinsey, a longtime Bain & Company rival, to investigate the state’s uninsured population. The preliminary work on the law was conducted in an ideology-free zone. “They didn’t approach it from the standpoint of ‘free market—yay!’ or ‘equality—yay!’ ” says Roy. Instead, it was the usual consultant’s method: “What is the problem? Let’s analytically define the problem.”

In his 2010 book No Apology, Romney writes that breaking down the uninsured population went a long way toward convincing him that universal health insurance was achievable. That population was made up of a few discrete classes of people, including the poor, young men who were self-employed or working for small businesses and wealthy individuals who could probably afford to purchase their own insurance. Romney describes another important discovery as “a collective epiphany”: The state’s uninsured were already receiving health care thanks to a federal law requiring hospitals to treat all comers; this was known as “uncompensated care.”

The health policy overhaul Romney eventually signed off on had a solution for each of the groups. The poor would be shuffled into the state’s Medicaid program, the lower middle class would be given subsidies to purchase newly regulated private insurance through a state-run health exchange, and everyone else would be required to purchase health insurance or pay a fine via a provision that became known as the individual mandate. Meanwhile, the plan would help offset the cost of the subsidies by eliminating the need for an expensive hospital-based safety net for the uninsured. It was a perfect consultant’s solution: built out of a handful of data points and targeted to solve a few narrowly defined problems.

It was also intended to be marketable, at least in the sense of furthering Romney’s political career. “What Romney had in mind when he got behind this idea,” says David Tuerk, the executive director of the Beacon Hill Institute, a free market think tank at Suffolk University in Massachusetts, “was creating a signature piece of legislation and getting himself to the presidency.”

Consultant Solution, Consultant Problems

But the characteristically consultant-driven solution resulted in characteristically consultant-driven problems. One peril of the hit-and-run advisory model is that consultants don’t tend to stick around to ensure that their advice is followed, or that it works as planned. And under Romney’s 2006 health care overhaul—dubbed RomneyCare—little has worked as planned. Romney declined to run for a second term, leaving office in January 2007. But in the years after his signature legislative achievement, RomneyCare has gone on to exacerbate the long-run problems it was supposed to head off.

The plan’s tripartite health coverage scheme—Medicaid, mandate, and subsidies—did manage to increase health insurance coverage, although not quite to 100 percent; according to state data, about 98 percent of the population is now covered. But it failed to eliminate spending on the hospital safety net. In fact, in recent years the cost of uncompensated care has steadily increased, rising 5 percent between 2008 and 2009 and a whopping 15 percent the following year.

Cost problems have plagued the program almost since its inception. In an April 2006 Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, Romney promised that under his plan “the costs of health care will be reduced.” Yet the overall cost of the program is projected to run roughly $2 billion over budget during the next 10 years. According to a June 2011 paper co-authored by the Beacon Hill Institute’s Tuerk, state health expenditures have gone up by a total of $414 million since the law was passed, while private health insurance costs have risen by $4.3 billion. The cost spike has been big enough that state health-insurance commissioners have worried publicly that it may jeopardize the system’s continued existence. They have also cautioned that medical spending could push both employers and patients into bankruptcy. Romney’s Democratic successor, Deval Patrick, has cited those additional costs to justify more taxes and fees, including a $1-a-pack hike on cigarettes and $89 million in added fees for state-based health insurers and providers.

Nor has the law had much success in restraining the state’s fast-rising family health insurance premiums, which on average cost more than in any other state in the nation. In a 2010 study, economists John F. Cogan and Daniel Kessler of Stanford and Glenn Hubbard of Columbia—the latter now the leader of Mitt Romney’s economic advisory team—found that RomneyCare “increased single-coverage employer-sponsored insurance premiums by about 6 percent in aggregate, and by about 7 percent for firms with fewer than 50 employees.”

Perhaps Romney’s promise of reduced costs was merely a convenient bullet point, a way of paying lip service to the client’s interests. His advisers—in particular, Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Jonathan Gruber, who was instrumental in conceiving the program’s structure—have made clear that they never believed cost control was part of the plan. “You can’t do cost control before coverage,” Gruber told The Washington Post in 2009.

“The Romney people try to have it both ways,” says Tuerk. “They say we were wrong, that costs did go down. But also that they never intended to control costs.” Indeed, Romney’s response to the law’s failures has been to dodge and redirect blame. He has repeatedly argued that his support for the law, in particular its controversial insurance mandate, was aimed at creating a system built on “personal responsibility.” Yet the result of the law has been not a flood of people newly paying their own way but a dramatic increase in handouts. Eighty percent of the newly covered are receiving subsidies from the state.

Romney and his aides blame other failures on provisions inserted by the Democratic legislature and shoddy implementation by Patrick. Asked about the law in a December interview, a domestic policy advisor to the Romney campaign quickly brings up both factors, singling out the Patrick administration’s decision to calibrate the law’s minimum coverage requirement in a way that is both more generous and more expensive than Romney would have preferred.

Political Failure

But the law was not merely a policy failure. It was also a political failure—at least in the sense that it did not sufficiently burnish the Romney brand. Quite the opposite. That’s because in 2010 President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, his signature achievement as well as the recent law most reviled by Republicans.

The problem for Romney is that ObamaCare bears more than a passing resemblance to his Massachusetts plan: a massive Medicaid expansion, regulated private insurance exchanges paired with generous subsidies for the middle class, and a mandate that all Americans carry government-approved health coverage or pay a fine. ObamaCare, in other words, looks suspiciously like a federal clone of RomneyCare—not the best selling point for a presumptive Republican nominee in a restive electoral year.

These days, Romney is strident in his opposition to ObamaCare, promising to repeal it (eventually) if elected. That position is tougher than the one he took in 2010, when he said, “I hope we’re ultimately able to eliminate some of the differences, and repeal the bad and keep the good.” Yet a national adoption of the Massachusetts plan may have been what Romney had in mind when he signed his own signature legislation into law. During his first presidential primary campaign, Romney enthusiastically touted the plan’s national possibilities. “We have to have our citizens insured, and we’re not going to do that by tax exemptions, because the people that don’t have insurance aren’t paying taxes,” he said at an Iowa debate in August 2007. “What you have to do is what we did in Massachusetts. Is it perfect? No. But we say, let’s rely on personal responsibility, help people buy their own private insurance, get our citizens insured, not with a government takeover, not with new taxes needed, but instead with a free-market-based system that gets all of our citizens in the system. No more free rides. It works.”

In October of that year, Romney told the Republican Jewish Coalition: “I think we’ll be successful nationwide. My plan, by the way, allows every citizen in America to get health insurance.” Asked by CNN’s John King at the time whether RomneyCare was a good model for the nation, he responded with a big grin, “Well, I think so.”

These days, he thinks not. In an October 2011 debate on CNN, Romney insisted, despite evidence to the contrary, that “in the last campaign I was asked, ‘Is this something you would have the whole nation do?’ And I said no.”

As a consultant, Romney was able to give advice and move on to the next client. Even as a private equity investor, he rarely had to stick with a single project for a long period of time. So what if the solutions didn’t always work as billed? There was always another deal to be sold, another problem to be defined, another solution to be proposed. This may help explain why candidate Romney seems so much better at defining public policy problems than defending his own solutions.

Or maybe Romney is just miffed that he wasn’t consulted on Obama’s reform. To this day, his campaign continues to defend RomneyCare and suggest that it has applications beyond Massachusetts. A Romney policy advisor who declined to be quoted without campaign approval told me that, in general, Romney favors other states working off the Massachusetts plan, but tailoring it to their own situation. On the stump, when he is accused of blazing the trail for ObamaCare, Romney frequently replies, “If that’s the case, why didn’t he call me?”

Obama didn’t call Romney, but he did rely on substantial advice and insight from several of the same advisers who played key roles implementing the Massachusetts plan: John Kingsdale, who ran the state’s health insurance exchange starting in 2006, and economist Jon Gruber, who helped design the framework. Records obtained by MSNBC show that the consultants met with top Obama administration policy officials a dozen times while ObamaCare was being drawn up. And if Gruber is to be believed, the Obama plan is a virtual carbon copy of Romney’s. “[Romney] can try to draw distinctions and stuff, but he’s just lying,” Gruber told The Washington Post in November. “They’re the same fucking bill.”

At this point, anyone hoping to pin Romney down on the relationship between RomneyCare and ObamaCare might as well try to nail an egg to the wall. In a lengthy November interview with Fox News host Bret Baier, a visibly uncomfortable Romney reiterated his recent claim that the law was good for Massachusetts but not for the nation. He told Baier that his “entire view” on the subject was laid out “clearly” in his book.

Reading No Apology is indeed clarifying, but probably not in the way that Romney intends. The first printing of the hardback summarized RomneyCare’s achievements and national implications with the line, “We can accomplish the same thing for everyone in the country.” When the book came out in paperback, that line was gone.

(Flexible) Corporate Strategy for America

Still, a close reading of No Apology is essential for Romney watchers. At first glance, it looks like an ordinary politician’s book, designed to attack Obama’s policies, defend Romney’s record as governor and businessman, and serve as both a preview of his campaign and a layman’s guide to the policies he now favors. The writing is clear but scrubbed of personality. There are dull, soft-touch anecdotes about Romney’s personal life, which reveal nothing of importance (apparently he hates weeding). There are broad discussions of policy bookended with cheery platitudes about American greatness.

But on closer examination, it becomes clear that the book is better understood as a sort of corporate strategy document. Except instead of focusing on a particular business, it offers a strategic vision for all of America.

No Apology opens with a survey of the marketplace for global power. Romney describes the “four strategies to achieve world power.” There’s the Chinese strategy based on free enterprise and authoritarian rule, the Russian strategy based on energy authoritarianism, the Iranian strategy of violent jihad, and the American strategy, which prizes economic and political freedom. The presentation-ready, four-part schema all but conjures up a drop-down projection screen and laser pointer.

Romney outlines these countries’ operational strengths and weaknesses, their core missions and their potential as threats to the client’s front-runner status. Jihadism is a “strategy based on conquest and compulsion”; the Chinese are “an enormously practical and intelligent people,” but they lack the “rule of law and regulation that shapes free enterprise elsewhere”; Russia’s power is based on “energy and commodities” as well as “the strength of its science and technology sectors.” Later in the book, Romney widens his scope to examine industrial effectiveness in other countries, such as Japan, citing consultant’s reports on international differences in productivity.

Seen through Romney’s eyes, these are America’s competitors, each with its own business model and product line, organizational theories and distribution channels. He seems to conceive of his job as proposing a strategic vision that will help America compete and retain its position as global market leader. More often than not, the core of Romney’s pitch is about competent management and smarter implementation—an America that is more efficient, better optimized, more focused on its core business.

In No Apology, Romney allows that the United States is “not perfect” and that “America will remain the leading nation in the world only if we overcome our challenges.” But his strategic vision seems tailored to flatter the client. It is inspirational rather than radical, highlighting strengths rather than attacking weaknesses.

So avowedly anti-radical is Romney’s blueprint that he advocates continuing programs he believes do not work. He concedes that Medicare will go bankrupt but promises to preserve and protect it. He insists that government is generally not the “source of new ideas” or “where innovation is commercially developed,” but also stresses that NASA and the military provide “frequent exceptions” to the rule. When American industry is challenged by foreign competition, Romney says he doesn’t “look for protectionist policies as an answer to the company’s problems,” yet he also avers that there may be “occasions when government properly should protect a domestic industry from foreign competition.” It is a consultant’s tap dance, hedged into strategic vision oblivion.

Even the policies of which Romney is most critical are not policies he would undo. Instead, he would tweak and tailor them, refining their processes through savvier implementation and a surer bureaucratic hand. In his book, Romney blasts the Obama administration’s handling of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the financial rescue package passed under President George W. Bush in the wake of the 2008 Wall Street meltdown: “TARP as administered by [Treasury] Secretary Timothy Geithner was as poorly explained, poorly understood, poorly structured, and poorly implemented as any legislation in recent memory.” Yet he has nothing but praise for the original policy itself and the Bush administration leaders who passed it. “Secretary [Henry] Paulson’s TARP prevented a systemic collapse of the national financial system,” he writes.

Romney’s problems with Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package are nearly identical. He says that after Bush’s $152 billion stimulus in 2008—about which Romney has no apparent complaints—it became clear that “another stimulus was called for.”

“The stimulus that was passed in early 2009 will accelerate the timing of the start of the recovery,” he writes, though not as much as if the plan had been designed to maximize the incentives for job creation. Calls for a new stimulus package would be wrong; the right course would be to “fix the current stimulus” (the book was published before most of the stimulus money had been spent).

Since the start of the primary campaign, Romney’s team has sought to give the impression that their candidate is more deeply opposed to Obama’s stimulus. In September, he released an apocalyptically moody ad pairing Obama’s soaring promises about the spending package with dark music and statistics showing the economy’s less-than-spectacular recovery. Later in the ad, a series of small-business owners appear one by one to dismiss the stimulus bill as worthless, while a spending ticker labeled “stimulus spending to date” ticks rapidly upward in the corner of the frame. In September, Romney told voters at a New Hampshire town hall event that he “never supported the president’s recovery act…no time, nowhere, no how.”

The distinction between Romney’s support for properly managed stimulus and his criticism of the Obama plan as passed is murky enough to give even his advisers pause. Asked over the phone whether it would be fair to say that Romney supports stimulus spending as long as it’s the right kind of stimulus spending, Romney’s policy advisor starts to answer, then pauses for several seconds before responding hesitantly that he has the impression that’s true but will need to check further.

Pick any political issue, and there’s a good chance Romney has taken more than one position on it. He has been both ardently pro-life and staunchly pro-choice. He has described immigration reform proposals that create a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants as both “reasonable” and an intolerable form of amnesty. He supported caps on campaign spending and new taxes designed to create a public funding source for elections, then denounced the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act for “hurt[ing] First Amendment Rights.” In 1994 he proudly noted his lack of alignment with the National Rifle Association while supporting waiting periods for gun purchases and bans on the sale of assault weapons; in 2006 he joined the NRA, praising its work in defense of the Second Amendment.

If flip-flopping is Romney’s greatest weakness, his business experience is probably his greatest strength. But can the two be separated? Consultants don’t have ideology; they have strategy. Their job is to take their current client’s side, whatever it is, and put a good polish on it while restoring whatever’s underneath.

Think about what Romney actually did while running Bain Capital. Stephen Kaplan, the Chicago business professor, argues that he should get credit just for having run something. But former Bain Capital partner Eric Kriss, who also worked with Romney in the Massachusetts governor’s office, has warned people not to read too much into the gig. “Mitt ran a private equity firm, not a cement company,” Kriss told The New York Times in 2007. “He was not a businessman in the sense of running a company. He was a great presenter, a great spokesman, and a great salesman.”

Those who have worked with Romney cite his flexibility as a virtue. “He’s spent his entire life in a world that’s constantly changing, where he has had to modify his thinking in order to address problems,” says Scott Meadow, his friend and former business partner. “I think it demonstrates something that I’ve always seen: an ability to adapt and change, and a willingness to accept that his thinking evolves. And not being afraid to change his mind and go in a different direction because that seems like the appropriate thing to do.” Meadow says Romney is “loyal to success,” whatever form it takes. “He’s flexible because he’s had to be,” Meadow says.

A Consultant for the GOP

Which is why Romney’s book, his speeches, his debate performances, and his interviews are not necessarily indicators of who Romney is and what he believes. Aside from being rhetorically pro-business, Romney appears to have no consistent ideological outlook. The best way to understand his campaign is as a top-of-the-line consultant’s report on the contemporary GOP.

His first set of major policy proposals, a 150-page PDF document titled “Believe In America,” has all the worst hallmarks of consultancy. It also reflects the baseline incoherence and inconsistencies of the client.

The document is heavy on information but light on insight, long on minutiae yet short on solutions. It has no sense of proportion: An appendix offers a 59-point list of “policy proposals that will get America back to work,” from minor bureaucratic tweaks (“establish fixed timetables for all resource development approval”) to specific legislative updates (“reduce corporate income tax rate to 25 percent”) to undefined wholesale federal overhauls (“undertake fundamental restructuring of government programs and service”). The proposals Romney does elaborate on tend to be carefully couched in the language of possibility and technocratic tinkering. “A robust investment tax credit, extending the write-off for capital expenditures for an additional year, and a lower payroll tax,” he writes, “could each have a positive effect if properly structured.” Implementation—management—is the key.

This constant hedging appears designed to avoid commitment whenever possible, but it also mirrors the indecision of the Republican base. Medicare—the single biggest driver of America’s long-term debt—is mentioned just three times in “Believe In America,” including a familiar jab at Obama for cutting $500 billion from the program to fund his health care overhaul. By the beginning of October, Romney could be found cajoling GOP voters in Florida with the line, “When you see your friends with signs that say keep your hands off our Medicare, they are absolutely right.”

Romney’s eventual Medicare overhaul proposal, unveiled that month, was yet another attempt to have it both ways. Like House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), Romney embraced “premium support,” a softer variant on individual vouchers that would give each Medicare beneficiary a set amount of money with which to purchase his own insurance plan from a menu of government-approved options. But perhaps sensitive to the barrage of criticism Ryan has taken for proposing to “end Medicare as we know it,” Romney opted to keep a government-run, fee-for-service Medicare plan as an option. “Unlike the Ryan Plan, Romney’s approach keeps traditional Medicare available as one of the insurance plans that seniors can choose among,” Romney’s campaign explained on his website. (A few weeks later, Ryan offered a version of his own plan that includes a Medicare-like option.)

Yet Romney’s plan doesn’t quite preserve Medicare as it has always been offered; under his plan, even “traditional” Medicare would be subject to the limits of premium support. Asked whether Romney’s plan could reasonably be described as ending Medicare as we know it, a Romney policy advisor admits that the structure of the program would be altered in the future. Why the hedge? Despite Romney’s oft-stated belief in the power of competition, he is not confident about it in the case of Medicare. His policy advisor warns that the effects of competition are still unclear, and it would be a mistake to eliminate a fee-driven system that has worked for years. Yet the whole premise of reform is that Medicare doesn’t work. In No Apology, Romney talks about the “burden” the program imposes. When outlining his reform proposal in October, he warned that “Medicare will go bankrupt at some point.”

In this, his second primary campaign, the problem that consultant Romney has chosen to solve is not the Medicare crisis, the federal debt burden, or sluggish economic growth. Instead, it is how to appeal to a Republican Party torn between Tea Party activists and Beltway moderates. Romney’s insistence on having it both ways at every opportunity reveals not just his own incoherence but a party with irreconcilable goals: a leaner federal government that cuts no major programs, a balanced budget with a beefed-up defense budget, entitlements that are reformed and reduced but never cut or changed. What does Mitt Romney believe? Like the PDF says, he believes in America—and anything America wants him to believe.

Peter Suderman is an associate editor at reason.

Synfuel Company With $25 Million Green Loan Calls Emergency Conference

2012-02-08T14:34:00-05:00

An East Bay synthetic petroleum company that received $25 million from the Department of Energy’s controversial loan-guarantee program may be headed for trouble after calling a special investor conference.

Emeryville, California-based Amyris Inc., which describes itself as an "integrated renewable products company...providing sustainable alternatives" using "industrial synthetic biology," has a regularly scheduled earnings conference on February 27. But the company will hold "an investor update regarding its progress and near term goals" this Friday.

It could be good news! The company's most recent report claims $31 million in product sales for the third quarter of 2011 — a 41 percent increase over the previous-year period. But Amyris, which is in the business of "commercializing" (greenspeak for "trying to sell") its No Compromise® line of synthetic petroleum products, has been clobbered in the stock market lately. Following the conference announcement, a Raymond James analyst downgraded the company.

Then again, those analysts hate America. And what bureaucrat’s imagination wouldn’t be fired by a company that converts plant sugars into hydrocarbon molecules to produce a range of renewable ingredients with potential uses in products from diesel and jet fuel to cosmetics, flavors and fragrances?

But it does raise a few questions: If Solyndra was Bush’s fault and Ener1 was China’s fault and Beacon Power was Solyndra’s fault, will Amyris be the first official victim of the Natural Gas Genocide? Also, does natural gas have an official villain yet? The Emir of Qatar, maybe? And finally: Amyris? Will the cutesy names never stop?

Enjoy [?] the soothing [?] harmonies of William Byrd’s "Though Amaryllis Dance in Green"...

Cheap Tickets to Space, Coming Soon

2012-02-08T13:59:00-05:00

In Popular Mechanics, space journo and consultant Rand Simberg—who wrote about the future of NASA in the era of private spaceflight in last month's print magazine—explains some of the nifty technical details he picked up from entrepreneur Elon Musk about SpaceX's reusable rockets and spacecraft.

But perhaps of greater interest to the less technically inclined spaceophiles among us, Simberg wraps up the piece like this:

Last week, the company announced the successful test of its new SuperDraco rocket engines, which will power the launch–abort system for the Dragon, making it safer for human occupation, and also act as the landing engines. The idea is that Dragon will land vertically on the pad, like the Falcon rocket components, as opposed to landing in the water with parachutes.

So what does that mean for ticket prices in the future? Musk tells us that with daily flights, the cost will run about $100 per pound. For the average male, that means about 20,000 bucks. Start saving your money.

In other words, none of the many players in the private space industry have actually taken paying customers off the surface of the Earth yet, but ticket prices are already experiencing some serious downward pressure. Virgin Galactic's $200,000 price tag is already starting to sound downright extravagant in the face of Simberg's back-of-the-envelope math. And the $63 million we're playing to the Russians to ferry American astronauts back and forth to the International Space Station right now? Horrifying.

Get the scoop on the whole scene from our Very Special Space Issue. (Now available online!)

Has Obama Declared "War on Religion" by Insisting Catholic Employers Cover Abortions and Condoms?

2012-02-08T13:20:00-05:00

One of the reasons I oppose government-run health care is that it automatically politicizes every aspect of medical treatment, lifestyle, and more. When taxpayers are footing the bill, they rightly have an interest in what gets funded and what doesn't. Should human-growth hormone shots for short kids be covered? Viagra for old men? And what sort of research should be conducted? It takes a situation that is already full of moral an practical ambiguity (one doctor's experimental treatment is another's quackery on a cracker) and puts it on steroids (which I'm guessing shouldn't be covered, unless it's for a "good" cause). God, what a tedious conversation!

Which brings us to the latest imbroglio involving President Barack Obama's health-care reform: the administration's insistence that most employers provide coverage for things that many religious organizations oppose, especially when it comes to reproduction. There seems little doubt that the law will have very few exemptions in its coverage for contraceptives and elective abortions. So while Catholic dioceses may not have to shell out for IUDs for nuns, Catholic hospitals and other closely-related outfits may well have to offer insurance plans that cover birth control and more that's against church doctrine.

Indeed, here are Democratic Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.), Barbara Boxer (Calif.), and Patty Murray (Wash.), three champions of the new law, trumpeting that

It was a historic victory for women's health when the Obama administration changed the law to require private health plans to provide preventive services including breast exams, HIV screening and contraception for free. This new policy will help millions of women get the affordable care they need.

They note "it can cost $600 a year for prescription contraceptives. That's a lot of money for a mother working as a medical technician in a Catholic hospital, or a teacher in a private religious school."

It sure is a lot of money. And there's something obviously wrong with forcing an employer - say, the Catholic church - to cover contraceptive or abortion services that it patently objects to. Indeed, there's something wrong with forcing employers and employees to offer or buy coverage in the first place. We all know that it's monstrously stupid - and an artifact of idiotic wage-and-price controls enacted during World War II - that health insurance is tied to the workplace. Way back when, separating work from health coverage was supposed to be one of the goals of reform, wasn't it? For god's sake, most businessess can't make good decisions in their chosen area of competition. Why should they be picking people's insurance?

Writng in National Review, the libertarian, pro-life Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) says that Obamacare's rules are nothing less than a "war on religious freedom":

[The] Obama administration’s recent edict requiring nearly all employers — including Catholic hospitals, schools, and charities — to cover sterilizations and contraception in their employees’ health-care plans. Because “contraception” includes abortifacients, this decision — made under the powers granted to the executive branch under Obamacare — also threatens many Protestant employers.

I'm an admirer on Rand Paul, who I think is without reservation the most libertarian member of the Senate (and I don't mean that as a backhanded compliment, given the generally low level of freedom-loving in the Senate!). He's the real deal when it comes to limiting the size, scope, and power of the federal government, and I'm glad he's gonna be around for a long time.

Yet I'm not convinced that Obamacare is the equivalent of a war on religious freedom. The individual mandate is unambiguously a war on freedom, for sure: the requirement that you buy coverage as a condition of being alive is clearly that. But as long as various health-care providers pull money directly from the federal government, it seems to me that they can be required to follow certain regulations. And most hospitals, whether private or public, religious or secular, are getting chunks of money from the federal government, through Medicaid and Medicare payments at the very least.

That's a strong argument, of course, for getting the government out of areas such as health care and education, where a similar problem obtains: Shouldn't K-12 schools and colleges that get government funding have to follow certain government rules? If you want that money, say, you shouldn't be allowed to discriminate on the basis of race or gender, right? And if you don't want that control, then opt out of the system, as colleges such as Hillsdale and Grove City have done by setting up replacements for Pell Grants and federally guaranteed student loans.

When it comes to education, though, most conservatives and libertarians challenge the idea that public money necessarily means strict government control. Indeed, the preferred argument when it comes to state-funded voucher programs is that as long as the money is being used by the individual, the state shouldn't be allowed to bully the schools that ultimately get paid into following a particular curriculum.

So I'm left wondering: If Obamacare was structured in such a way that it gave individuals vouchers to cover all or part of the cost of a health-care policy of their own choosing, would that solve this particular objection? I think such a policy would cause all sorts of problems, including a general increase in health care costs (just as easy, government-backed student loans have given rise to a "higher education bubble"). But would switching to a voucher plan for health-care obviate the issue of religious freedom? It seems to do the trick when it comes to education.

Of course, looking over what I've just written really drives home two different but related points:

First, that any health-care reform which doesn't de-link insurance from the workplace is really not serious in transforming a system that everyone seems to hate but won't fully jettison.

Second, even if Obamacare is booted by the Supreme Court later this spring or repealed upon the ascension to the White House of his royal highness Newt Gingrich, we'll still be facing a situation in which government at all levels is already spending about 50 cents out of every health-care dollar. Which means that reform will still be a top priority come 2013 whoever is actually getting sworn in.

Another Example of How New York Cops Make Their Own Law

2012-02-08T13:01:00-05:00

In my column today, I note that police in New York City are still arresting people for "public display" of marijuana in circumstances that Commissioner Ray Kelly says make the charge inappropriate. Yesterday a federal judge approved an agreement that settles a class action lawsuit by New Yorkers who were busted on another kind of bogus charge: Long after courts overturned anti-loitering laws on First Amendment grounds, the NYPD continued to arrest people for loitering. The $15 million settlement could mean up to $5,000 for each person who was the victim of an illegal arrest. The legal battles over loitering bans in New York go back three decades:

The settlement came after a federal judge held the city in contempt in 2010 for "obstinance and uncooperativeness," as the police continued for years to make arrests under laws that had been declared unconstitutional. The laws had banned loitering to panhandle or to search for a sex partner, or while in a bus or train station.

Federal and state courts struck down those laws between 1983 and 1993 as violating First Amendment rights, but some 22,000 people were charged with the offenses from 1983 to 2012....

Some of those who were caught in the web of laws that had been declared invalid testified about the frustration of being rounded up when they had not broken the law.

One panhandler described an evening on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens during which officers recited their flawed understanding of the law: "'You can’t be begging.'"...

The lawyers who filed the suit claimed that the police hierarchy was not aggressive enough in training officers and challenging the police culture. They noted that officers often carried "cheat sheets," handed down from one generation of officers to the next, that included simple descriptions of the laws used most often by officers on a beat for summonses and arrests. The sheets, still in use, are seldom updated.

You can begin to understand how it is possible that the NYPD is still arresting people for a bit of pot in their pockets 35 years after the state legislature supposedly decriminalized marijuana possession.

New Paper Finds Stimulus Spending Funds Government Employment, But Not Private Sector Growth

2012-02-08T12:14:00-05:00

It’s common enough to find discussions of economic stimulus that revolve around the assumption that government spending produces a positive multiplier: Spend one dollar, boost the larger economy by two. But at the very least, the aggregate evidence that government spending consistently produces positive economic growth is murky. When University of California economist Valerie Ramey reviewed the literature on stimulus spending for the Journal of Economic Literature last year, she found that the literature suggested that temporary, deficit-financed government purchases result in multipliers somewhere between 0.8 and 1.5, but that “reasonable people can argue” that the data indicate multipliers as high as 2 but as low as 0.5.

This sort of variation doesn’t tell us whether the multiplier is positive or negative. Instead, it tells us that the evidence isn’t clear, that economists don’t agree, and that sweeping conclusions about the positive effects of stimulus spending don’t hold up.

Now Ramey has found additional evidence that the lower range is more likely to be the correct one. In a new paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Ramey asks two questions. First, does increased government spending result in an economic stimulus that increases private sector spending? Second, does more government spending increase employment?

Ramey, who’s been criticized in the past for her choice of samples and variables, addresses those concerns here by running the numbers using multiple statistical techniques and historical samples. But no matter how she arranges the data, she finds the same result: “An increase in government spending never leads to a signiﬁcant rise in private spending. In fact, in most cases it leads to a signiﬁcant fall.” The upshot? According to Ramey, the evidence suggests that the multiplier for government spending is probably below the even-money mark. It’s a bad investment.

There are some benefits, however—just not for the private sector. Ramey finds evidence that government spending can increase employment—mostly by hiring people to work for the government. “Increases in government spending raise government employment,” she writes, “but not private employment.” This is contrary to President Obama's 2009 promise that "more than 90 percent of jobs created under this recovery act will be in the private sector." Stimulus spending: Good for the government, not so great for the rest of us.

(Thanks to Cato's Tad DeHaven for the pointer.)

Halftime in America: Remy Chrysler Ad Parody

2012-02-08T12:00:00-05:00

Slave the Whales!

2012-02-08T11:50:00-05:00

Does the 13th Amendment apply to critters? Can whales be plaintiffs? People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals thinks so, and has filed suit in a San Diego court to emancipate killer whales from Sea World facilities in San Diego and Orlando:

PETA argues that continuing the whales' "employment" at SeaWorld violates the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibits slavery.

District Judge Jeffrey Miller heard arguments in the complaint Monday and reviewed the response from SeaWorld, which asked that the lawsuit be dismissed. His ruling is expected to come later.

The suit, filed in October 2011, asked that the court declare that the orcas are "held in slavery and/or involuntary servitude by defendants in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution."

"It's a new frontier in civil rights," said Jeff Kerr, PETA general counsel, who described the hearing as a "historic day."

"Slavery does not depend on the species of the slave any more than it depends on race, gender or ethnicity," he argued. "Coercion, degradation and subjugation characterize slavery and these orcas have endured all three."

The complaint says the five killer whales are represented by their "friends" at PETA, which include three former killer whale trainers, a marine biologist and the founder of an organization that seeks to protect orcas.

The complaint demands that the court "appoint a legal guardian to effectuate plaintiffs' transfer from defendants' facilities to a suitable habitat in accordance with each plaintiff's individual needs and best interests."

Does Tilikum, who killed an Orlando Sea World trainer in February 2010, have the right to a trial by a jury of his peers? Can whales vote? Can they be president? Do they have the right to bear arms? Does PETA have the right to arm bears? This is so exciting!

Justice Anthony Kennedy and the Future of Gay Marriage

2012-02-08T11:32:00-05:00

In his 1996 majority opinion in the case of Romer v. Evans, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy struck down a Colorado constitutional amendment that had forbidden state officials from taking any action designed to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination. “The amendment imposes a special disability upon those persons alone,” Kennedy wrote. “Homosexuals are forbidden the safeguards that others enjoy or may seek without constraint.” Several years later, in his majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), Kennedy struck down that state’s ban on sodomy for violating the liberty protected by the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. "In our tradition the State is not omnipresent in the home," Kennedy wrote. "Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct."

So when 9th Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt sat down to write yesterday’s decision nullifying California’s Proposition 8, which had amended the state constitution in order to forbid gay marriage, Kennedy’s words were not far from his mind. Indeed, Reinhardt repeatedly cites Romer while making the case against Prop. 8. But Reinhardt does not make similar use of Lawrence. Why not?

As I noted yesterday, Reinhardt’s decision did not recognize a constitutional right to gay marriage, it simply holds that in this specific case California has violated the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause by allowing gay marriage and then later taking it away. Had Reinhardt wanted to the address the larger question of gay marriage’s constitutionality, he undoubtedly would have cited Kennedy’s sweepingly libertarian decision in Lawrence. That he did not do so suggests that Reinhardt does not believe that Kennedy is currently ready to vote in favor of that constitutional right. Thus the 9th Circuit offered Kennedy a narrower argument relying on the narrower precedent in Romer. Should the Supreme Court take up the Prop. 8 case on appeal, there’s no way Kennedy is going to go against his previous line of argument in Romer. It was a crafty—if transparent—move by Reinhardt. We'll see if it works.

Climate Scientists Violate Own Advice: Opine On Topics About Which They Have No Expertise

2012-02-08T11:31:00-05:00

Back on January 27, the Wall Street Journal ran an op/ed by some distinguished researchers arguing that climate change is no big deal. The op/ed, No Need to Panic About Climate Change, asserted:

...the number of scientific "heretics" is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 "Climategate" email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

If there is not all that much warming, then why is there so much brouhaha about it? The op/ed continued:

Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them.

Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.

Not too surprisingly, those accused of being bought-and-paid for alarmists were annoyed. Earlier this week, the Journal published a response from 38 of the perturbed alarmists, Check with Climate Scientists for Views on Climate. Their letter asserted:

Do you consult your dentist about your heart condition? In science, as in any area, reputations are based on knowledge and expertise in a field and on published, peer-reviewed work. If you need surgery, you want a highly experienced expert in the field who has done a large number of the proposed operations.

You published "No Need to Panic About Global Warming" on climate change by the climate-science equivalent of dentists practicing cardiology. While accomplished in their own fields, most of these authors have no expertise in climate science. The few authors who have such expertise are known to have extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert. This happens in nearly every field of science. For example, there is a retrovirus expert who does not accept that HIV causes AIDS. And it is instructive to recall that a few scientists continued to state that smoking did not cause cancer, long after that was settled science.

So, there! And what do "real" climate scientists believe?

Climate experts know that the long-term warming trend has not abated in the past decade. In fact, it was the warmest decade on record. Observations show unequivocally that our planet is getting hotter. And computer models have recently shown that during periods when there is a smaller increase of surface temperatures, warming is occurring elsewhere in the climate system, typically in the deep ocean. Such periods are a relatively common climate phenomenon, are consistent with our physical understanding of how the climate system works, and certainly do not invalidate our understanding of human-induced warming or the models used to simulate that warming.

Thus, climate experts also know what one of us, Kevin Trenberth, actually meant by the out-of-context, misrepresented quote used in the op-ed. Mr. Trenberth was lamenting the inadequacy of observing systems to fully monitor warming trends in the deep ocean and other aspects of the short-term variations that always occur, together with the long-term human-induced warming trend.

Question: How long before the short-term variation with minimal warming [PDF] suggests that there may be something wrong with the climate computer models? Just asking.

In any case, the climate experts then go on to become the equivalent of dentists practicing cardiology:

It would be an act of recklessness for any political leader to disregard the weight of evidence and ignore the enormous risks that climate change clearly poses. In addition, there is very clear evidence that investing in the transition to a low-carbon economy will not only allow the world to avoid the worst risks of climate change, but could also drive decades of economic growth. Just what the doctor ordered.

Really? Scanning the list of signers of the letter one does not find that any seem to have any special expertise on economics and public policy. Perhaps the climate "dentists" are recommending open heart surgery to treat tooth decay. Interestingly, the op/ed to which they object does cite economic expertise in reaching its conclusions:

A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now. Many other policy responses would have a negative return on investment. And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.

I will also mention that the public policy side of the Reason Foundation which publishes this website released a report back in December looking at the economics of climate change that reached similar conclusions:

"Using the IPCC's own highest emission scenario, we show that by 2100 the Gross Domestic Product per capita of today's 'developing' countries will be double that of the U.S. in 2006, even taking into account any losses resulting from climate change. Thus developing countries will have significantly more resources and better technology to cope with climate change than even the U.S. does today," Goklany says. "But these advances in adaptive capacity and what they'll mean for our ability to cope with any potential warming are virtually ignored by the IPCC when it assesses the possible impact of global warming."

The study outlines three approaches to tackling climate change: cutting emissions of greenhouse gases; focused adaptation; and economic growth. "The best strategy by far to combat climate change is economic growth," says Julian Morris, the study's project director and vice president at Reason Foundation. "Economic growth is the best way to eliminate poverty; meanwhile, the resulting wealth and technological advances will enable people better to address all the problems they face, including any challenges that global warming may present."

For what it's worth, the climate experts asserting consensus about the reality of man-made global warming cannot, on the basis of their climate expertise, assert a consensus on the policies needed to address the problem.

Go here to read the Reason Foundation study on the best policies to handle future climate change.

Come See the Matt Welch/Jonah Goldberg Libertarian/Conservative Smackdown Tonight in D.C. at AEI! Or at Least Watch the Live Podcast! Also, Listen to the Pre-Interview!

2012-02-08T10:33:00-05:00

As mentioned previously in this space, I will be debating Jonah Goldberg tonight at the American Enterprise Institute on the question of "Are Libertarians Part of the Conservative Movement?," for one hour beginning at 6:30 pm sharp. I hear RSVPs are filling up, so get on in there if you care to bolster the libertarian hissing (or finger-wiggling!) section. It's at the AEI Conference Center, at 1150 17th St., NW, Washington, DC 20036, two blocks from Farragut North metro station. There will be wine & cheese after, perhaps as an olive branch to the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" contingent.

For those not near the evil Beltway, there will be a live video feed at this link. From what I understand they might even be taking questions (or reading hilarious insults) from the online rabble.

Yesterday, I got the ball rolling with a lively podcast interview with the AEI folks, which you can listen to here.

Sheldon Richman on Stopping Israel from Attacking Iran

2012-02-08T10:30:00-05:00

Israel’s highest officials tell American journalists their air force may attack Iran’s nuclear facilities this spring, although Israeli and American intelligence agencies say the Islamic republic has no plan to build a bomb. The officials might be bluffing, but the threats pose a problem for the Obama administration. As Sheldon Richman explains, it would take courage hitherto uncharacteristic of this president to withstand the pressure to get involved and instead keep America out.

View this article.

Obama Can Stop Israel from Attacking Iran

2012-02-08T10:30:00-05:00

The officials might be bluffing, but the threats pose a problem for the Obama administration. In recent weeks there has been much in-person contact between the governments. U.S. officials have reportedly asked Israel to give harsh economic sanctions (and perhaps covert warfare) a chance to take effect.

The problem is that an attack could bring Iranian retaliation against American military forces in the region, including Afghanistan, wreak havoc with the U.S. economy if Iran closes or mines the Strait of Hormuz (through which much oil passes daily), and create pressure for U.S. intervention if Iran strikes Israel.

The Obama administration appears unenthusiastic about a war with Iran in this election year. An oil disruption would shake the fragile economy and jeopardize President Obama’s reelection. The administration seems to be betting that the American people are war-weary, which explains its announcement of an ahead-of-schedule mid-2013 combat troop drawdown from Afghanistan. Obama is taking flak from Republicans for declaring that deadline, but his political strategists surely have calculated that more voters will be relieved than concerned.

Seen in that light, war with Iran is the last thing Obama would want this year.

But there is a complication: Israel and its powerful American lobby. Israel’s political leaders, though apparently not its military and intelligence chiefs, want to bomb Iran, not because they fear an attack should it acquire a nuke—which would be suicidal for Iran, since Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons—but rather because Iran, now close to Iraq thanks to the U.S. regime change there, could inhibit Israel’s ability to have its way with its neighbors and the long-suffering, occupied Palestinians, especially in the blockaded Gaza Strip.

Obama’s political problem is that it would be ill-advised, particularly in an election year, for an American president to be at odds with the Israeli government and its lobby here, which is pushing Congress to adopt the harshest measures against Iran’s economy.

Thus Obama can’t openly tell the Israelis not to strike Iran, though his subordinates are doing this behind the scenes. Reporter Gareth Porter has disclosed that

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey told Israeli leaders Jan. 20 that the United States would not participate in a war against Iran begun by Israel without prior agreement from Washington. …

But the Israeli government remains defiant about maintaining its freedom of action to make war on Iran, and it is counting on the influence of right-wing extremist views in U.S. politics to bring pressure to bear on Obama to fall into line with a possible Israeli attack during the election campaign this fall.

The big questions are (1) Does Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu think this warning is a bluff? and (2) What would Obama do if the prime minister calls it? In other words, if Israel strikes Iran in April or May and Iran retaliates against Israel, would Obama stick to his word and stay out? Or would he try avoid the Israel lobby’s and Republicans’ inevitable charges of “appeasement” by intervening?

It would take courage hitherto uncharacteristic of this president to withstand that pressure and stay out.
An important consideration in all this is the widely held assessment that Israel alone couldn’t do enough damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities, major parts of which are deep underground. As The Washington Post’s David Ignatius reports, “The Israelis are said to recognize that damage to the nuclear program might be modest, requiring another strike in a few years.”

So while Israel insists on its freedom of action, it realizes it would need America’s help. This means that the Obama administration holds the upper hand: It is in a position to stop Israel from igniting a catastrophic war in the Middle East simply by declaring publicly that it will not back Netanyahu if he orders an attack—or covertly provokes Iran into firing the first shot.

Americans who oppose war with Iran can best serve peace by demanding that Obama make such a declaration.

Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation in Fairfax, Va., and author of Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State. This article originally appeared at The Future of Freedom Foundation.

A.M. Links: Santorum Smothers the Midwest, Payroll Tax Cut Fails Again, U.S. Embassy in Iraq Faces Splenda Crisis

2012-02-08T09:00:00-05:00

After big wins in Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri, Santorum is on everybody's lips.
Pilots object to FAA bill's authorization of unmanned drones in U.S. skies.
No extension for payroll tax cut (yet).
Ben Bernanke has been vindicated, claims Bloomberg.
The U.S. embassy in Iraq is facing a sugar/Splenda shortage. Also the salad bar sucks.
CDC declares bread/dinner rolls gastronomic enemy number one.

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New at Reason.tv: "Jim DeMint: Why Republicans Must Become More Libertarian"

Jacob Sullum on New York's Illegal Pot Crackdown

2012-02-08T07:00:00-05:00

Thirty-five years ago, New York's legislature decriminalized marijuana possession. Senior Editor Jacob Sullum says numbers released last week show the New York Police Department continues to flagrantly flout that policy, wasting resources on a pointless, unjust, and illegal crusade against pot smokers.

View this article.

New York's Illegal Pot Crackdown

2012-02-08T07:00:00-05:00

Thirty-five years ago, New York's legislature decriminalized marijuana possession. Numbers released last week show the New York Police Department continues to flagrantly flout that policy, wasting resources on a pointless, unjust, and illegal crusade against pot smokers.

Under the Marijuana Reform Act of 1977, possessing up to 25 grams of cannabis (about nine-tenths of an ounce) is a citable offense similar to a traffic violation, punishable by a maximum fine of $100. But if the marijuana is "burning or open to public view," that's a Class B misdemeanor, punishable but up to three months in jail. An officer who uses intimidation or coercion to convert the former offense into the latter, thereby providing a pretext for an arrest, is breaking the law.

Don't take my word for it. In a directive issued last September, New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly reminded the city's cops that "the public display of marihuana must be an activity undertaken of the subject's own volition." He said the charge is not legally appropriate "if the marihuana recovered was disclosed to public view at an officer's discretion."

Why did Kelly think it was necessary to remind his officers that they are supposed to follow the law? He was responding to complaints that police in New York manufacture misdemeanors by instructing people they stop to take out any contraband they might have or by searching them (ostensibly for weapons) and pulling out a joint or a bag of pot.

Such tricks help explain why pot busts have skyrocketed in New York City during the last decade and a half, even while marijuana use (as measured by government-sponsored surveys) has remained about the same. From 1997 through 2011, according to figures compiled by Queens College sociologist Harry Levine, the number of low-level marijuana arrests averaged about 39,000 a year, 14 times the average for the previous 15 years.

Based on interviews with "veteran New York City legal aid and public defender attorneys and supervisors from Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx," Levine estimates that "two-thirds to three-quarters of the people arrested for misdemeanor possession" are busted in circumstances that Kelly himself says make the charge unjustified. Yet nine weeks after his directive, marijuana arrests were down only 13 percent compared to the same period in the previous year, and new data show the number for 2011 was 50,684, the second highest total ever.

Kelly seems unperturbed, suggesting that most of the arrests involve people brazenly waving their weed under officers' noses, although he concedes it's "very difficult to quantify" what fraction of the busts are legitimate. "Our clients are still regularly stopped [and] searched, and marijuana is recovered from their pocket," a Bronx public defender told A.P. last week. "At no point were they having it out [or] smoking it."

If such arrests are as common as they seem to be, most of the 400,000 or so pot smokers busted on Kelly's watch have been wrongly detained, wrongly fingerprinted, wrongly jailed, wrongly booked, and wrongly saddled with criminal justice records and all the attendant expense, inconvenience, and humiliation. Adding to the unfairness, these burdens are disproportionately borne by young black and Latino men, even though surveys indicate they are less likely to smoke pot than young white men.

The marijuana arrests are largely an outgrowth of the NYPD's "stop and frisk" program, which focuses on supposedly suspicious individuals in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods. In New York City during the last three years, Levine calculates, blacks were seven times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession as whites.

To stop these bogus busts, Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries (D-Brooklyn) and state Sen. Mark Grisanti (R-Buffalo) have introduced a bill that would treat public display the same as possession for small amounts of marijuana. Kelly had a chance to show this legislation was not necessary, but it is abundantly clear by now that the NYPD cannot be trusted to decide whether pot smokers should be treated like criminals.

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason and a nationally syndicated columnist. Follow him on Twitter.

A Touchy Situation

2012-02-08T06:00:00-05:00

Officials at California's Lupine Hills Elementary School placed a sexual battery claim on the permanent record of a 6-year-old boy who accidentally touched another boy on the groin or leg during a game of tag. The boy wasn't identified by local media. Only after his family got a lawyer did the school agree to remove the claim from the boy's record.

It's Santorum Time!

2012-02-08T01:31:00-05:00

The come-from-behind kid, Sen. Rick Santorum, though still third or last in most national polls and severly underfinanced, wins non-binding contests in Minnesota, Colorado, and Missouri.

Minnesota's and Colorado's were nonbinding caucus straw polls; Missouri's a completely confusing and meaningless vestigial result of their state's inability to act fast (that nonetheless drew well over 200,000 voters with nothing better to do), with the state's real caucus to happen next month.

Ron Paul came in second in Minnesota, with 27 percent, as his campaign figured he would. From his speech tonight Paul seems to think that he'll end up with more delegates when the whole selection process ends. They will not be bound by the results of today's straw poll. Paul continued to do much better in percentage terms than 2008 everywhere.

Romney's appeal everywhere versus either 2008 or a month ago seems to be slipping; he won Minnesota in 2008 but was third today, and won Colorado in 2008 but was a close second to Santorum today.

It's still a race, for better or worse. If Santorum keeps doing well, certainly for worse.

Halftime in America: Remy Chrysler Ad Parody

2012-02-07T20:30:00-05:00

It's halftime.

Both teams are listening to a Madonna performance that sounds eerily similar to a Lady Gaga song they'll hear 10 years from now.

It's halftime in America too.

People are out of work and they're hurting.

And they're wondering where all their money went.

Well, $12.5 billion of it went to Chrysler.

In the form of a bailout.

But it's okay, because Chrysler is all-American.

Though technically 58.5 percent of Chrysler is owned by an Italian corporation.

And Chrysler manufactures many of it's vehicles in Canada. And Mexico.

But I guess that doesn't make for a great commercial.

Unlike polar bears. Or dogs. Or that digestive yogurt.

Yeah, Americans are hurting.

And their dollars are being used to bail out the chosen ones.

Instead of themselves.

What happened to freedom?

What happened to choice?

Yeah.

We need to guard them like Ben Roethlisberger's friends guard a bathroom door.

Allegedly.

Written by Remy and produced by Meredith Bragg.

About 1.30 minutes.

"Halftime in America" is one of a series of collaborations between Remy and Reason.tv. To watch all of them, including "Grandma Got Indefinitely Detained (A Very TSA Christmas)," "The Occupy Wall Street Protest Song," "Raise the Debt Ceiling Rap," and "Why They Fought," go here now.

To watch Remy's other videos, go to youtube.com/goremy

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"Tim Tebow Law" Would Let Homeschooled Virginia Kids Play Public School Sports, Already Lets Columnists Complain About Too Much Choice

2012-02-07T18:47:00-05:00

Sometime this week Virginia lawmakers are expected to vote on a law which would allow the state's "tens of thousands of" homeschooled kids to play sports on public school teams; in fact it would prevent public schools from being part of any intramural-type organizations which barred the presence of homeschoolers.

HB 947 is known to its friends as as the "Tim Tebow law" because the Denver Broncos quarterback was homeschooled in Florida, but played on his local school's football team after pushing for the bill which gave him permission to do just that. Said bill is expected to pass in in the State House, having already cleared the House Education Committee.

Fourteen states allow for homeschooled kids to play public school sports. Thirteen more allow kids to play with certain conditions attached.

So, who are the folks objecting to this bill? (You know they're out there.) Various news reports summarize objections along the lines of: hey, public school kids have to keep up certain academic standards to do extracurriculars, why do those pajama-clad-until-noon, weirdo spelling champs get out of that? The Governor of Virginia supports the bill, but the 60,000-strong Teacher's Association is not keen for reasons both tentatively practical (public schools say their belts are tight enough as it is) and school spirit-heavy (you didn't want to be a part of this whole experience, so no, you don't get to play soccer!).

Washington Post columnist John Kelly is also displeased with this legislative notion. After mentioning the problem with Teacher Mom or Dad grade-inflating so that little Josiah can be the school's starting quarterback, and comparing the bill to Kelly's old drama teacher casting students from a girl's school and a college student in high school plays, the columnist continues:

[M]y main objection is philosophical.

School does a lot of things, just one of which is educating students. School is a place children learn to get along, learn what it means to work in a group, to navigate the shoals of cliques and conflicts. It’s where you learn some of the basics of what it means to be a citizen.

We often despair about our public schools in this country, but they’ve been a common experience for millions of us. If you happen to not agree with that common experience, you might decide, as is your right, to home-school your child.

You may have all sorts of reasons. Perhaps our public schools are too secular for you. Or maybe our public schools aren’t rigorous enough for you. Maybe our public schools aren’t safe enough for you. Maybe you love your children more than the rest of us love ours and you just want them around you all the time.

Whatever the reason, you’ve made a decision. You have the courage of your convictions. Except now, supporters of this bill want to loosen their convictions a bit.

“They just want to try out,” the bill’s sponsor, Del. Robert B. Bell (R-Charlottesville), told The Washington Post’s Anita Kumar. “They just want a chance to participate with their friends, their neighbors, their community members.”

Guess what: They do have the chance. They can go to public school.

And the vital point, which everyone else who objects to the bill seems to be making in one way or another:

I’m not against home-schooling. I’m against people wanting to pick and choose the parts of a public education they agree with.

Libertarians or homeschoolers who vehemently dislike public schools are often accused of being purists, but the people making these arguments are real hard-liners.

One choice is being opened up to students here, the choice to be homeschooleled and also to play sports with kids their own age. Even without the compelling hey, my parents pay the taxes which help this school exist argument, what's so terrible about one more choice for kids and their families? Kelly's column is carefully in favor of homeschooling's legality, but he really doesn't seem to like the practice, he's more wearily resigned to it.

Bob Cook over at Forbes.com is initially less snotty about the fact of homeschooling, but this attitude of "you made your education bed, now lie in it" still lingers throughout. That gets real, as the kids say, about here:

I just find it so rich that homeschool advocates are more than happy to run down public schools and explain why they’re just not good enough for their little budding geniuses, yet they’re begging to lean on and cherry-pick the public school for things they can’t provide.

"So rich" is a pretty strong rhetorical cue. Cook thinks homeschoolers are elitist egg-heads! But he then goes on to make the point that private school families have to pay taxes but are not offered this option.

Fair point.

But why aren't they? If a private school doesn't have a football team or a soccer team, but the local school does, well, why not let kids get their chance to play? Or even let each school decide instead of mandating at the state-level, which the Tebow bill admittedly does?

Maybe that's a bad idea, but having just celebrated School Choice Week at Reason DC, I'm feeling particularly keen on choosing. The columnists and other dissenters say kids can't have an education buffet, but why can't they? Why can't they take physics at school, but read history at home, or any another variation?

I suggest that with super-optimism and a general love of freedom but also, dammit, if you want the parents' tax dollars, there should be some education options. Parents pay, so you had better let in a thousand homeschooled Christian dorks so that they too can be future football stars who provoke an ire I cannot began to understand. That's fair. And that's one small step towards real school choice.

(Still, in my day in Pennsylvania we played touch football in the park near the house where we had our homeschool group. We didn't need no dad-gummed public school for that. Sometimes we didn't even have shoes. Really, there was a memorably muddy spring day in about seventh grade where we all played shoeless.)

Reason on education and homeschooling; Veronique de Rugy on how increased school spending doesn't seem to produce smarter kids.

Orwellian Irony in the Extreme Double-Plus-Good Update: It's a fake!

2012-02-07T17:15:00-05:00

Picture of the the day, courtesy the Twitter feeds of Libby Jacobson, Soren Dayton, and Radley Balko.

Update!: So it turns out the picture above is a photoshopped image. For a shot of the building's front, go here and here for an explanation.

And here's a 2007 story from the Daily Mail about the proliferation of closed-circuit TV cameras (CCTV) in Orwell's old neighborhood.

Ronald Bailey Reviews Abundance: Why The Future Will Be Much Better Than You Think

2012-02-07T17:15:00-05:00

The end is not nigh argues X Prize guru Peter Diamandis and journalist Steven Kotler in their new book, Abundance. Instead they assert that humanity stands on the threshold of a period of radical transformation in which technology has the potential to significantly raise the basic standards of living for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey explains why he thinks that the two techno-idealists are on to something.

View this article.

A More Better Future

2012-02-07T17:15:00-05:00

Woe is us! Our overpopulated and overheated world is running out of water, food, and nonrenewable resources, all the while menaced by natural and bioterror pandemics. As The Limits to Growth famously predicted 40 years ago, exponential growth in population, resource depletion, and pollution are leading inexorably to civilizational collapse. Most readers will be familiar with this conventional lament of impending doom.

Now comes X Prize guru Peter Diamandis and journalist Steven Kotler with their new book, Abundance: Why the Future Will Be Much Better Than You Think. Are they insane? Everyone knows that things are getting worse in this worst of all times.

“Humanity is now entering a period of radical transformation in which technology has the potential to significantly raise the basic standards of living for every man, woman and child on the planet,” assert Diamandis and Kotler. “Abundance for all is within our grasp.” How? The way to beat doomy exponentials is to outrun them with boomy exponentials. Diamandis and Kotler argue that radical progress in overcoming scarcity will be driven chiefly by the transformative application of information and communication technologies to the world’s hardest problems.

Diamandis and Kotler begin by asking, why do so many of us despair of the future? They note that natural selection has shaped our brains to be hyper-vigilant about threats. The result is negativity bias, that is, a disproprotionate focus on negative infomation and experiences. Comparatively rare bad news crowds out the more plentiful good—and we believe the world is going ever faster straight to hell.

The two abundance visionaries strongly counter that, in fact, much of humanity has never had it better and that in 25 years everybody could have the access to the resources and knowledge to live fulfilling lives. They point out that doomsters only see the slices of the pie getting smaller; meanwhile, exponential technological progress is creating more pies for everyone.

Solutions to various scarcities don’t just add up, they multiply. For example, access to clean water produces positive feedbacks that address and reduce other scarcities. Supplying clean water means that far fewer poor children die of waterborne illnesses, which results in lowered infant mortality rates and thus leads to lower population growth rates, which enables women to join the paid labor force and provide more family resources for educating their less-numerous kids, and so forth.

Diamandis and Kotler liken the spread of the technologies of abundance to the exponential expansion of mobile phone technology throughout the world. In 1990, there were 10 million mobile phone subscribers; today there are more than 5.6 billion. World population is just over 7 billion. So what other exponential technologies might secure global abundance in a generation?

They stack the “grand challenges” that stand between now and reaching global abundance into a three-tiered pyramid. At the base of their pyramid are the challenges of getting enough clean water, good food, and shelter to the truly impoverished. The next tier is supplying abundant energy, ample educational opportunities, and access to ubiquitous communications and information. Freedom and health cap their third tier.

Today, a billion people in the bottom tier of the pyramid lack access to safe drinking water and 2.6 billion to basic sanitation. Diamandis and Kotler cite promising research on new nanofilters for cleaning water and smart grid technologies to dramatically reduce water losses from leaks and cut irrigation water needs nearly in half. Other researchers are working on toilets that turn feces into ash and flash evaporate urine.

On food, while the two techno-idealists mistakenly discount the significant achievements of the Green Revolution based on misinformation peddled by charlatan activists like Vandana Shiva, they do properly celebrate the real contribution that biotech crops have made and will make to boosting farm productivity and reducing hunger in poor countries. While pointing to the success of aquaculture in producing protein, they miss the fact that fisheries being open access commons are the cause of overfishing. They highlight the progress being made toward growing cultured meat in vats.

Fueling exponential technological progress will be a growing cadre of do-it-yourself (DIY) innovators. In a highly connected world, small groups are collaborating to solve problems quickly that bureaucracy-heavy governments and corporations would take years to do. They cite the examples of DIY Drones, which developed autonomous unmanned air vehicles at a fraction of the cost of military contractors. And DIY biologists are creating a tool-kit of standard interchangeable biological parts that can be used to create organisms to clean oil spills or vaccines.

Another positive trend is the increasing integration of the poorest people into the opportunities afforded them by the global economy. Entrepreneurs are figuring out that even poor people have money to spend. For example, Ruf N Tuf jeans are sold as ready to stitch kits costing a tenth the price of regular jeans (although consumers may already be moving up the quality curve on jeans). Dematerialization means that more and more functionality is crammed into less and less material. Consider all the goods and services now available through the average smart phone: cameras, radios, TVs, Web browsers, recording studios, GPS, word processors, flashlights, board and video games, encyclopedias, maps, translators, and more.

On the next tier of their pyramid stands energy and education. Today, one and a half billion people are still without access to electricity. Diamandis and Kotler argue that a future of energy abundance will result from improved solar power, new battery technologies, low energy LED lighting, and traveling wave reactors generate electricity for 50 years while burning nuclear waste as fuel. Algae might produce liquid transport fuels. Schools will be leapfrogged by personalized education will be delivered by cheap laptops connected wirelessly to the Internet.

At the top of their pyramid is health care and freedom. Diamandis and Kotler point out that the last century has seen huge increases in life expectancy from 35 years to 67 years around the globe. They outline a future in which doctors and patients have access to all the world’s medical information and diagnostics through lab-on-a-chips connected to their cell phones. They do suggest that “the rigorous, somewhat calcified, nature of the first-world health care regulatory process” will result in health care breakthroughs being made in other parts of the world. Laboratories will quickly concoct personalized treatments for each patient; perhaps even using 3-D printers to produce organs for transplant.

With regard to freedom, the main flaw of this book is that it is almost entirely devoid of any consideration of the institutional requirements that have enabled technological progress they celebrate to occur, namely, the rule of law, property rights, market economies, and free speech. Perhaps Diamandis and Kotler assume that as people around the globe become more prosperous as the result of technological progress they will demand and achieve more social and political liberty.

Nevertheless, the spread of new information technologies is critical for securing and maintaining political freedom and holding governments accountable. Just today, The Washington Post is reporting how the operation of a new website in Kenya, ipaidabribe, is being used to combat pervasive corruption in that country.

Of course, technologies in the wrong hands can hurt rather than help. Diamandis and Kotler briefly look at the threats of bioterrorism, cybercrime, and technological unemployment. Bioterrorism is best combatted by open and broadly distributed technological capability. Cybercrime has no silver bullet solutions, although software that updates itself and plugs security holes would help. Employment is how we earn the wherewithal needed to survive in a world of scarcity; abundance will enable people to pursue goals other than just survival.

Diamandis and Kotler conclude, “We hope that our contrarian view of the future has provide an antidote to some of today’s dark pessimisms. Providing abundance is humanity’s grandest challenge—one that together, with intention and action, we can make happen in our lifetime.” Abundance makes a pretty persuasive case that the future will be better than many people think.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

DOJ Continues Investigation of Rupert Murdoch, Komen VP Resigns Over Planned Parenthood Flap, Obama Staffers Defend About-Face on Super PACs: P.M. Links

2012-02-07T16:44:00-05:00

The DOJ is dedicating still more resourches to investigating Rupert Murdoch.
SCOTUS likely won't hear Prop 8 appeal.
Organizing for America defends Obama's super PAC decision.
Rick Santorum replaces Newt as Not-Romney of the week.
Komen Foundation VP resigns over Planned Parenthood kerfuffle.
Argentina to restart the Falklands War.
Russian envoy makes nice with Syrian butchers.

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